


thrilled by the still of your hand

by brightlyburning



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alpha Steve Rogers, Alpha Tony Stark, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Dom Steve Rogers, Dom Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Mutual Pining, No Healing Cock, Omega Bucky Barnes, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Praise Kink, Rape Recovery, Sub Bucky Barnes, sam wilson is not your therapist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2020-06-03 16:51:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19468120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightlyburning/pseuds/brightlyburning
Summary: The world shivers on its axis. The scent burns into the marrow of his bones, the fabric of his muscles, curls around his brainstem. A faint pulse of alarm shudders across his skin from the north, then transforms to sharp-edged curiosity - Tony, pulled from his analysis of the Insight program, tuning into their bond, sensing the change - and a ferocious triumph.Omega. Theirs. Steve yearns to taste the sweat gilding his throat, knot his hand in that flowing dark hair, but the man staring back at him has nothing, an utter absence of feeling, on his lovely face."Barnes?" Steve breathes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never thought I'd write an A/B/O fic, but here I am. Turns out my id wants a fic that uses all the research I've done on trauma and uses my penchant for porn. In this AU, Steve and Bucky never met before the fight in Winter Soldier; Bucky went to Europe and was taken from Azzano before Steve could get there. Hope you all enjoy!

It takes two solid hits from the Winter Soldier before Steve's on the back foot, heart pounding. A desperate certainty creeps up his spine that this guy, whoever he is, whatever lives behind that black mask, is like him: enhanced, some version of Erskine's work pumping through his veins. 

The Winter Soldier fights like a machine, remorseless, and it's all Steve can do to stand up to it, aware in a way he hasn't been in so long that he might actually die here, this opponent might actually kill him. He's an alpha, enhanced beyond that with the serum, and even yet- 

They come to blows again - the man catches the shield, hurls it half a foot deep into the side of a van - Steve dodges the hissing knife, grabs his mechanical arm and twists it around the edge of the shield until the plates scream and something snaps deep within the arm's machinery.

 _'Wish Tony were here_.' His alpha partner would know how to take this arm, if not the man, out of commission.

Yet the worst thing about this man - the Winter Soldier - isn't just that he put actual terror in Natasha's eyes, or that he has no compunction about destroying an expressway full of civilians: it's the awful eerie silence of him, no sign of pain as Steve wrenches his shoulder out of joint. Even an uppercut to the chin doesn't get the slightest flinch or grunt, only an even hiss of breath through the mask.

Steve lunges. He gets his fingers about the edge of the mask, caught between cold skin and hard plastic, sets his other arm about the Winter Soldier's shoulder, rolls them both over the hood of a car and hurls the Winter Soldier into the air.

The mask clatters across the burned pavement. The air suddenly reeks of peppermint.

 _'What-?_ '

The man turns. Pale grey eyes, empty of feeling, set in a face too thin for the bulk of his body, his expression worn and set. Sweat beads at his temples, in the hollow of his pale throat, exposed, vulnerable, and that scent-

A room in Azzano decades and years ago, stained with gouts of old blood, the air carrying only a fading whisper of that very same scent. The Howling Commandos' devastated faces as Steve had been forced to tell them that the beloved sergeant they'd asked him to retrieve, one James "Bucky" Barnes, had been killed. 

Morita had gotten a field promotion to sergeant, and they'd gotten Leibowitz to fill in as sniper, but it hadn't been the same. Steve would've trusted the Howlies with his life, and did, but he'd always harbored a selfish suspicion that they held his failure to save Barnes against him. 

The world shivers on its axis. The scent burns into the marrow of his bones, the fabric of his muscles, curls around his brainstem. A faint pulse of alarm shudders across his skin from the north, then transforms to sharp-edged curiosity - Tony, pulled from his analysis of the Insight program, tuning into their bond, sensing the change - and a ferocious triumph. 

_Omega_. _Theirs_. Steve yearns to taste the sweat gilding his throat, knot his hand in that flowing dark hair, but the man staring back at him has nothing, an utter absence of feeling, on his lovely face.

" _Barnes?_ " Steve breathes. 

"Who the hell is Barnes?" says Barnes. His voice scrapes at Steve's ears, all rust and death, the sound of ancient machinery creaking back to life. No corresponding pheromone burst from Barnes, no inviting tilt of his head to expose his neck; can he not recognize the bond, not smell the way Steve's practically bleeding possessive pheromones into the air? 

Apparently not, because Barnes coils into himself, preparing to launch-

"Got your back, Cap!" Sam swoops in from the overpass, kicks Barnes in the back of the head and sends him sprawling. 

Steve jolts forward, a roar stuck in his throat. The idiot primal impulse to lunge at Sam for attacking his omega flares then quails as Natasha fires an RPG into the car beside Barnes. Whirls of flame and smoke expand, swallowing Barnes up within their maelstrom, and as the smoke begins to dissipate, he's gone.

Steve stares at the spot where Barnes stood. His heartbeat drowns out the approaching sirens. Two years since meeting Tony - another alpha on the same team, a rarity in a world where the dynamic population is only fifteen percent, and bonding - and now, _now_ they find their omega? An omega who works for Hydra. An omega who must have been enhanced by Hydra. An omega who didn't seem to know his own name.

"-gers! Earth to Rogers!"

Steve startles, whips around to find Natasha standing near him. "Yeah." His own voice is strange in his ears.

"You knew him." Natasha drops her outstretched hand and rotates her wrenched shoulder, grimacing. Behind her, Sam has picked up the mask to sniff it, nose wrinkled.

"His name's James Barnes. Went by Bucky back then, though." Steve forces himself into motion, and Natasha falls into step beside him. Her eyes widen, just a bit; Barnes must have been part of Steve's file, then. "He was part of the 107th, that group captured at Azzano. Zola had been performing experiments on them, trying to duplicate Erskine's serum, and by the time I got there, Barnes was gone. I thought he'd been killed, but Zola must have-"

He stumbles. 

"Steve?" 

"Hydra's had him for seventy years," Steve breathes. Horror chokes his lungs. His vision mists red. What could they have done, what _must_ they have done, with those seventy years, to turn a man the Howling Commandos would follow into hell into the Winter Soldier?

Natasha gestures at the carnage all around her, her expression devoid of sympathy. "He's on their side. You can't let yourself get complacent."

Steve controls himself with an effort. He has to breathe shallowly against the stench of peppermint as they join Sam, who's turning the mask over in his hands, brow furrowed.

"This thing reeks," Sam declares, "and it makes no sense. You usually smear scents around if you're going to be working with corpse disposal. Unless he expected to have to clean up Sitwell?"

Steve shakes his head. "No." The words are hollow in his mouth. "It's to block out pheromones." The smell must have burned Barnes’ entire respiratory tract the entire time he wore that mask. Bad enough to be dynamic, attuned to pheromones, and with the enhanced senses of a serum recipient on top of it: he shudders, bile rising in his throat. 

"Wait, he's dynamic?" Natasha cuts in. "We didn't have any intel on that. Did you scent him?" She digs her phone out to call Maria Hill, starts requesting an evacuation. The sirens' wails increase in volume. 

Sam passes the mask to Steve. He takes it reluctantly, breathing through his mouth in a futile effort to keep the smell from choking him. It doesn't do much, and for a moment he's tossed back into his old body, his lungs revolting against the overwhelming intensity. The mask feels almost breakable in his hands, the material light. He twists it, and it holds, springing back into shape as he lets up the pressure. Huh. Maybe some sort of metal-laced plastic? Tony would probably know. Further inspection yields little; there's some thin fabric sheets laced over the vents on the inside, probably some sort of personal protective equipment to keep out pheromones or smoke, but it doesn't have any microphones or radio capability as far as he can tell.

It served only one purpose, then: keeping the world locked away from Barnes. He turns the mask over in his hands once more, then lets it fall to the street. No point in taking it with them. It's entirely possible that Hydra has a tracker in it he can't detect.

He takes another breath of good clean air. The cruelty of it, of forcing a man to wear a mask that chokes him for no purpose other than hurt, decides him.

"He's an omega. My and Tony's omega." 

Natasha's mouth falls open. "He's _what?_ "

"You could tell that from one whiff?" Sam's brow knits. "I thought it took longer?" 

"Okay, Steve, you've got to tell us on the way, Hill's sent me the evac point." Natasha urges them towards an alley, breaking into a jog. "But you're sure?"

"Yeah." They're both non-dynamic, he can't blame them for being cautious. He's skimmed a few of the manuals printed on dynamics for non-dynamic people, and they never get the bonding experience quite right: make it sound animalistic or over-romanticize it. "I could tell with the first sniff he was omega and compatible, but it takes longer to actually form a bond. It took a solid year for Tony and I, and most of that was us dragging our feet over bonding to another alpha."

"It's pretty rare, right?" Sam keeps Steve's pace, the both of them following Natasha as she leads them further into the tangled mess of alleyways. "Riley was dynamic, but he never said anything about same-dynamic bonds."

"I'd never heard of it. I mean, not that it's surprising; no one believed I was an alpha when I was a kid, so I missed out on all those classes. Tony'd heard of it in his classes when he bothered to pay attention, but he'd always been annoyed by his dynamic. Tried to ignore it, I think." He smiles at the memory of Tony's appalled face, back when he was just Stark, his wide eyes glaring at Steve over where his hands clamped over his nose. "But when we got a good whiff of each other, it was over; we were compatible, and we had to decide what to do with it."

"And now the Winter Soldier's compatible with both of y'all." Sam whistles, shaking his head. "That's fucked up, man, and it's not like the guy seems to be firing on all cylinders."

"No," Steve agrees. Ahead of them, Natasha is climbing into the rear of a black SUV, and Steve catches a glimpse of Hill in the driver's side mirror. 

Sam swings his pack off his shoulder and into the back of the SUV. "So, forgive me the nosiness, but what are you going to do about it?"

"Call Tony, when I get the chance. Stop Insight. Once that's over with, then-" he glances down at his shield, runs a finger across the edge that had so recently dug into his omega's arm, "-we'll see."

* * *

_The man on the bridge_ -

The shower cuts off. Cold water swirls down the drain, colored rust-red with old blood and dirt. The asset waits for permission to move. 

"Next," the technician grunts, seeming bored by the after-action procedure. 

The asset leaves the shower cubicle and steps into the pair of pants the technician hands him. The arm they gave him sparks, the spark hitting the asset's chest in a bright flare of pain. Warmth.

"Next."

The asset fastens the pants and stoops for the technician to dry his hair. This technician is impatient and wrenches the asset's neck, but that is his right. The towel slides down as the technician lets it go, rasps over the asset's back and puddles on the floor.

The asset knows better than to grab something. To attempt to possess something.

The asset breathes. The air entering and exiting his nose is different, missing something. The scent- the man on the bridge-

"Next."

The hallway to the maintenance room is, as always, too short. As they enter, the asset becomes aware of the rifles trained on him, the red dots all clustered in a perfect circle atop his sternum. The chair, and its halo, await. The asset sits, arms on the rests provided for the purpose, palms-up, veins exposed. They strap him in. The dots fade from his chest.

"Next."

The asset clenches both fists. Veins swell in lurid relief. Another technician sticks him with a needle. Blood spurts into the various tubes they attach to him and gets carried away for processing. A different team of technicians swing into motion around the asset's left arm. They flip open panels, dig into the arm with humming lasers and tiny saws.

The asset is aware of pain radiating from his left shoulder, but this is expected and can be left out of the eventual report. Instead, the asset stares into space. Sniffs the empty air. There is an itch at the back of his neck. A discomfort beneath the skin that started the moment he met the eyes of that man on the bridge. His stomach twists.

He is not functioning optimally. 

The technician from the shower sits in the center of the asset's field of vision. The after-action procedure checklist glitters on the tablet he holds.

"Next," the technician drawls, stylus held above his tablet. 

"My levels of pain are optimal," the asset reports. "My levels of hunger and thirst are sub-optimal." He pauses. Swallows. He knows the format of a report. Knows the data they expect: pain, hunger, thirst. All else is unnecessary. Does he report what happened on the bridge? The creeping certainty that that man was important? The irritation clawing at his throat?

"Next."

Oh. The report is over. "I am functional," he says. They do not want unnecessary information.

The technician nods and checks off the last two boxes on his tablet. The colors on the tablet screen blur into the eyes of the man on the bridge.

A room in Azzano. Searing pain emanating from his arm. Zola. The fist of Hydra. Cold. _Cold-_

He returns to himself with guns trained on him and the Secretary bent in front of him. Pain sears his cheekbone. No, _no_ \- he missed the next step, the mission report-

"Sir!" A technician scurries to the Secretary's side and offers him another tablet, which the Secretary takes, eyebrows raised, mouth twisted in displeasure. "We did the usual after-action blood analysis, and its hormone levels are bizarre. Oxytocin and vasopressin are elevated, adrenaline is still at combat levels, and dopamine is also sky-high."

The Secretary pauses in the act of putting on his glasses to read the tablet. "What does that mean?"

The technician, pinned in place by the Secretary's gazes, babbles, "I did some quick research, and I'd forgotten that the asset's dynamic, but it turns out that high levels of those hormones indicate that the asset found another dynamic individual, one it's compatible with, one it wants to bond with."

The asset stills in the chair. Tries to breathe shallowly. Yes. It- he's dynamic. He'd forgotten. Hydra has found its dynamic a hindrance. They bred him twice, some time ago, to see if the serum could be passed down, but the experiments were failures, both children taken and given to Hydra members to raise. Since then, they've kept him on ice the majority of the time, especially when the biannual heat cycle approaches. 

He is dynamic, and now it matters again.

The STRIKE team members snicker in the background, one of them making a joke about how addled omegas' brains get at the mere chance of a knot, but the Secretary does not laugh. His piercing gaze turns towards the head technicians. 

One of them steps forward and offers,

"We cauterized the olfactory epithelium twice, but the serum regrew it both times. We've been putting odors in the asset's mask to block pheromones, but that depends on the mask staying on, and when the asset returned it didn't bring the mask with it."

"I see." The Secretary scrolls through whatever is on his tablet, his expression darkening with each page. "Well. At least we have a reset button." He glances back at the technicians. "We _can_ wipe him, yes?"

Dread coils about the asset's throat and squeezes tight. His shoulders tense with the anticipation of pain.

The technicians glance at each other. One swallows, then ventures, "We can, the asset's displayed amazing levels of neuroplasticity, but it hasn't been that long since the last wipe-"

The Secretary cuts her off with an impatient gesture, dropping the tablet onto a nearby cart. "No matter. Wipe him. We'll try again." 

"Yes, sir."

The Secretary storms from the room, the technicians erupting into a flurry of activity as the door closes behind him. 

The asset shudders. Opens his mouth to accept the biteguard. Notices that the technician offering it looks eerily like him. 

He shuts his eyes and imagines the face of the man on the bridge as the lightning closes in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for taking the time to read my id-fic, and please feel free to leave comments or criticism!


	2. Chapter 2

"Steve, light of my life, joy of my soul, you look like shit," Tony says as Steve's video stream flashes onto the wall of the lab. 

Steve's in some sort of ghastly bunker, the background all concrete cinderblock and the lights harsh fluorescents that do nothing for his appearance. No obvious injuries. 

Steve hears the concern for what it is and smiles, though the expression is tired. "I'm fine." 

His partner doesn't look fine, his hair a mess, ash smeared across one cheekbone, but Steve's just as stubborn as Tony. This is probably one of the things Tony can let go. Probably _should_ let go, considering how Steve gets about any hint of mother henning. Besides, they have an omega to talk about.

"Tell me about them," Tony demands, hands busy at the keyboard and eyes fixed on Steve. He's running through the recent SHIELD archives to try and pinpoint the genesis of Insight, but it doesn't take much of his attention. All the more for Steve, who at last has learned to accept Tony's constant multi-tasking. "Guy, girl? Hot? Blond, brunette - oh, a redhead! We could have the whole spectrum. Are they with you? How'd they react?"

"He's a brunette, and yes, he's very attractive." Steve leans his head back against the wall and sighs. "And no, he's not with me. It's, uh - it's complicated."

Tony raises his eyebrows and gestures at Steve, then at himself. Complicated, hah, that's their daily lives. "What? He's an alien?" He freezes. "Please tell me he doesn't work for the Department of Defense. I will still date him, but things will be awkward."

Steve laughs. He leans out of frame to get a snack bar, which he gulps down in two huge bites, then sobers. "He doesn't work for the government now, but he did once. Odd question, but did Howard ever talk to you about a James Buchanan Barnes? Or he might've called him Bucky?"

Good job, self: Tony's hackles hardly raise at the sound of his father's name in Steve's mouth these days. Howard had been non-dynamic and horrified at his son's alpha status, always suspicious that one day Tony's inherently violent nature would 'win out' and he'd punch out an investor or go running off to live in some anarcho-primitivist commune.

"He talked about him a few times, yeah." A quick search of the Stark Archives catalog reveals little, and a run through historical databases doesn't get much more: some citations, couple of census records, a scanned studio photo of a handsome young man in uniform. "He mentioned him in his war journals as a member of the Howling Commandos and an incredible sergeant and sniper. Last mention of Barnes in Howard’s journals is that he was lost at Azzano. Looks like he's still coded MIA, received a Purple Heart in theater and a Silver Star in absentia for volunteering to be experimented on at Azzano in order to spare his men. He’s got two surviving sisters and a bunch of descendants - oh, hey, this is interesting." He sends a map of 1940s Brooklyn with Barnes' birthplace marked on it to Steve's phone. "He lived ten blocks north of you for almost his whole life. You might've walked right past him."

Steve studies the image. The blue light of his phone screen lends him a ghostly air, as though he's faded back into the sepia-toned map. "Funny." His tone holds only a deep and hollow grief.

Suspicious now, Tony pauses in his work and gives Steve his undivided attention. "Why do you ask? Is it one of his relatives?"

"No." Steve meets Tony's gaze. He swallows hard. "A doctor named Arnim Zola was at Azzano, doing some work for the Red Skull. The Howlies mentioned he'd been performing experiments on POWs there, but they didn't have any idea of what, as the POWs who got selected for experiments all died. Turns out that Zola was working on creating his own version of the serum."

"I thought the serum and procedure died with Erskine. You're one-of-a-kind.” Tony jerks his chin at the lab next door, where Bruce is bent over a microscope. “It drove the DoD crazy, that's why Bruce got funding to try and recreate the process, and he was damn lucky it didn't kill him. I mean, no wonder all the POWs died." 

Steve takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. "As we were leaving Azzano, the Howlies begged me to sweep the facility one more time to find Barnes, in case we could bring him or his effects home, but-" he shrugs, "-he wasn't there. Just a room full of blood and an old scent. I figured he'd died."

“Seems like a safe bet to me? It’s been seventy-odd years.”

“Yeah. You’d think so, but Zola took Barnes with him. I don’t know where they went - at that point the Reich was on the back foot, and it’s not like Germany had much intact infrastructure left - but wherever they ended up, Zola managed to recreate the serum.”

Tony pushes his chair closer to the screen with Steve on it, his mind awhirl, connecting the dots. "Then Hydra must have a super-soldier. Fine, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that, and-" he glances up at Steve, who looks back at him, mouth tilted in a smile as he watches Tony run the scenarios, "- it explains a lot of what Hydra's been able to do in terms of geopolitics and a lot of the financial backing they've been able to garner; hard to say no when they can prove they've created a second-rate Captain America. Barnes must've gotten the serum, but then why didn't Zola create other super-soldiers- never mind, deal with that later - why would Barnes work for Hydra? The entire point of the Commandos was to operate against Hydra, and if nothing else, Barnes dedicated his life to his men."

"They did something to him." Steve's expression twists something in Tony's gut. "They made him into an assassin called the Winter Soldier, and they've used him for the last fifty years to do their dirty work. I fought him at the highway earlier today, and I smelled the same scent as at Azzano."

Tony blinks and glances at the photo floating in air behind him: Barnes, clean-shaven, army cap tilted at a rakish angle atop thick dark hair, a lively spark in his pale eyes, generous mouth curled in a smile. 

"Then the omega- it's _Barnes?_ "

Steve catches sight of the photo. His face crumples, just a bit, the most vulnerability he'll allow himself. "Yeah. But, Tony, he didn't even seem to smell my pheromones, much less know who he is. He asked me who Barnes _was_."

That's fucked _up_. Tony swallows, narrows in on the easier option. In a panic after his initial compatibility with Steve, he'd read every paper and article he could on same-dynamic bonds, and at least, for this, he has an explanation. "Sagara and Tomino, 2012: their paper profiled a double-omega partnership who met a compatible alpha. The alpha didn't fully sense the compatible pheromones until both the omegas were present." 

"Then-"

"Already on it." Tony's up, scooping his cellphone up, the screens darkening and the lab shutting down as he heads to the elevator. Steve's picture unfolds from the phone as Tony boards the express elevator to the common floor. "I'm taking a suit. Should be there in about an hour and fifteen, less if I punch it. What's your plan?"

Steve glances at something out of frame and nods to whoever he's talking to. "Yeah. Just a minute." He looks back at Tony. "That was Natasha. The current plan is for Sam and I to attack the three helicarriers and disable the control chips linking them to the Insight program, while Natasha and Fury go after Pierce and get proof of Hydra working within SHIELD."

"Okay." The suit locks into place around him, Steve's image now unfurling on the heads-up display, his voice in Tony's ears. Tony drops his cell into one of the waiting helpful arms, then hurls himself into space. The repulsor jets catch him and loft him skyward, out of the city's spires, before he twists into a long arc heading south. "What kind of proof? Archives? Plans? What're they going to do with it?"

"My understanding is anything they can get from SHIELD's database in the Triskelion." Steve stands, the view shifting to show just how grimy the bunker they're in is. He joins Natasha, Wilson, Fury, and Hill at a table, hunched over a paper map of the Triskelion and surrounding Potomac, and places the phone on the table for a 360 degree view. "And as for what we're doing with it-"

"Leaking it," Natasha says. She spares a moment of her plotting to favor Tony with a nod. "Tony."

"’Leaking it?’" Tony echoes. "To where? And how? Like, just hurl all of SHIELD's database into the ether and hope for the best?" No way Natasha is that reckless.

"We have some trusted journalists who cover the domestic intelligence community in mind," Fury says. For a man recently dead, he looks as acerbic as ever. "And yes, some of your plans are in the database, but I don't want any of your bitching; Romanov's sacrificing almost all of her cover identities, and every satellite SHIELD office will have to relocate."

"Big ouch, and also, I don't give that much of a shit about my helicarrier plans, those are old at this point." Tony keeps his focus on Fury. "What about the data relating to the Winter Soldier?"

Fury shrugs. "What about it? The man's a mad dog at this point, and we all know what you do with mad dogs. Whatever we get from the database on him isn't going to matter to him, but it might get us some sympathy before the Senate."

Tony grits his teeth and corrects his heading to angle around the approach vectors for the airports. In the corner of his vision, Steve's expression darkens.

"That man is _Bucky Barnes_." Steve leans into Fury's space, but Fury only arches an unimpressed brow. "And he deserves privacy."

Fury barks a laugh. "'Privacy?' I guarantee whatever sick shit Hydra did to him isn't worth his privacy compared to what he's done to the rest of the world." 

"So you want to violate him further, how nice," Tony says, tone flat. "Look, when the Ten Rings got me, they broadcast my bloody and beaten face all over the world, and that in itself was almost as bad as everything else they did to me." 

The various little arguments happening around the table in the bunker cease, their attention now fixed on him. 

Tony swallows around the sour taste of bile, forces out, "Every time I meet someone now, I have to wonder if they're comparing me to that broken man they saw on their television. Barnes may not be as image-conscious as I am, but I can tell you, it fucking _sucks_ to have everyone's first impression of you be you at your lowest moment."

Fury starts to say something, but gets cut off by Natasha. "Is this because he could be your omega?"

Steve's head whips toward her so fast that Tony fears for his brain. Instead, he soars upward to avoid a passing flock of Canada geese - bird shit is impossible to clean - and drawls,

"Well, that depends entirely on if he wants to be with me and Steve, doesn't it? And even if he doesn't, I still wouldn't want whatever Hydra did to him floating around without his consent, because, hey, consent is sexy or however the kids say it these days." Besides, seventy years' worth of documentation on his torture and brainwashing, _Christ_ \- he'd end up a lab rat, the only thing of worth about him his trauma.

"You really think you can keep the CIA from him?" Fury drums his fingers on the tabletop, making the image wobble in a fucking annoying way. Might be worth exploring adding stabilizers to the Avengers' phones. "Even for you, that's arrogant. They're going to want him in a concrete box if they can get him alive, in a pine box if they can't. You going to stand up against the entire intelligence community for a murderer?"

Hey, look, pretty rivers. Tony traces their path with his eyes and carefully does not order all of Fury's bank accounts drained. 

Steve steps in. "None of us believe on judging a person based on how they are at their lowest." Diplomatic, good job, Steve.

"Be that as it may," Wilson says, "we should probably get back to planning how to attack the Triskelion. We're running low on time here."

"Not without a guarantee," Tony says, low, unsmiling. "Every file related to the Winter Soldier or James Barnes stays unsent."

"How do we know you'll let the rest of it go through?" Fury snaps. In the background, Wilson rolls his eyes and stares heavenward. 

"I know this may seem impossible, but you might just have to trust me."

Fury snorts, but Natasha preempts him again.

"All right," Natasha says. "I'm sending you the room address in the Triskelion for the World Security Council meeting. It's where I'll leak the files from, so you can put your filter in place." She stares at Tony. Her eyes are black pits. "If the files don't go through, we will know exactly who to blame."

"Noted."

She nods, then turns towards the others, brisk. "As for the rest of you, let's get back to it."

Steve catches Tony's eye and nods. He mouths, "Love you," to which Tony ruins the entire mood by saying,

"Love you, too, sugar pie, see you soon! Don't get killed!"

The last thing he sees from the video feed is Steve's embarrassed grin and a large hand reaching for the phone.

"We're in the infranet of the Triskelion, sir," Jarvis reports. "Here is a map of all Ethernet ports."

James Barnes' smile haunts his memories. What hell must Hydra have visited upon that young man whose watchword was loyalty to break him? Who'd willingly sacrificed his life for his men, only to learn that life would be all too long? 

He may not know much about James Barnes, but Tony knows this: 

No one - man, woman, dynamic, non-dynamic - deserves what has been done to this man. 

* * *

The asset waits, stationed before the helicarrier's control chip column.

The Falcon has been grounded. The Widow is elsewhere. The captain's tread rings on the deck outside the control room.

The Secretary told him to hold the line. The helicarrier's control chips must be kept safe.

There had been no time, no acceptable procedure, for the asset to express the discomfort prickling at the back of his neck. He would have told them about the odd itch in his nose, in his chest, if they had asked. He would have begged them to ask, but the asset may not beg, and his speech is only acceptable in relation to a mission. Others may have called this unfair. Fairness does not apply to the asset. He is a weapon, and weapons have no concept of such things.

He shifts, relaxes and clenches his hand about the pistol grip. 

The captain stands before him. There is sorrow in his eyes, in his voice, when he says,

"People are going to die."

People always die. Whether quietly or loudly, bathed in blood or crushed beneath the weight of the century, people die. All except the asset. He, alone, is not allowed. History is an iron thing, and to bend it to its proper shape is the task of decades, of men without souls.

"I can't let that happen."

A smell. Sweat, smoke - something rich, comforting - Dernier's soup - but who is Dernier - the smell isn't _right-_

His neck itches. It feels bare, vulnerable, even swathed in tactical gear and armor. Incomplete, as though wishing for teeth to scrape across it. 

The asset's face must twitch without his control, for the captain takes a step forward. His weight reverberates down the walkway, and a horrifying image flares behind the asset's eyes: that weight atop him, those lips on his neck, fingers interlaced through his, comfortable, controlled -

"Please don't make me do this," the captain begs.

Pleas have no place in the world Hydra is building. The asset fires. 

They smash together as the helicarrier rises over the river, trading blows - the gun proves worthless, already out of ammo - he flips it in his hand, uses it to pistol-whip the captain. The captain's blood and sweat spatters his face. Snarling, his skin afire, his lungs burning, the asset lunges and hurls the captain over the railing onto the glass bowl below. He leaps the railing and follows, fist shattering glass as the captain jerks aside. 

His teeth itch to be buried in the captain's neck, his fists to be caught and held still in careful hands. His back, slick with sweat, feels naked without someone covering it, his tac gear abrasive and offputting. He _wants_ , and he isn't _allowed_ , and the captain's scent is all around him - 

But it's not right, it's _incomplete_ \- 

The captain isn't fighting back, is letting himself be beaten, and alphas don't do this. Aren't supposed to do this. Is this how little the captain values him, that he won't even fight for him? Rage splinters black between his teeth. 

Glass shatters as the helicarrier begins to tilt towards the river, and a man armored in red and gold soars into the glass bubble, their private world of smoke and fire and blood.

The asset freezes, perched atop the captain, his fist cocked back. Tightens his other hand about the captain's throat and roars, lips drawn back, his hair soaked in gore, every fiber of his body aflame. 

The captain manages something through bloodied lips that sounds like 'Tony,' and the mech suit opens. 

Another man, this one shorter, but his shoulders broad, his arms thick with muscle. He steps forth from the suit like he has no fear, and his sharp dark eyes flick to the captain's beaten face and then settle on the asset. 

His eyes are kind, and then he kneels on the breaking glass, thousands of feet in the air, and extends both hands, palm-up.

"Hey there, beautiful."

The asset hunches into himself and snarls. This new man's voice rubs across his skin like warm water, being clean after a mission, the faintly remembered feel of sunlight. His eyes burn, his throat is boiling with words he can't say - the fire is inside him -

"Bucky, sweetheart, you're scared, I know, but you need to stand down," the man says, and carried on the wind, gritty with smoke and ash-

Another scent.

Warmth. A place that might be home. A promise, offered without regret: you can belong here.

Wild, the asset twists to stare at the captain, pinned beneath him, and the captain's swollen lips tick into a smile. One large gloved hand circles about the asset's wrist on his own throat, and a thumb strokes his pulse.

"Don't be scared," the captain says. "Please."

Shaking, agonized with hope, with the sudden unfurling of possibility, the asset rasps,

"Alphas?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! If you feel inclined to, please feel free to leave kudos, reviews, comments, criticism, et cetera.


	3. Chapter 3

Leaning down from the borrowed quinjet's exit ramp to the Triskelion's roof, Steve offers a hand to Natasha, still in her severe blue pantsuit. Her hair billows in the backdraft in a red cloud, the dust forcing her to squint to see him. The engines’ roar drowns out the sirens of the emergency services vehicles clustered around the Triskelion and the Potomac's banks. 

She takes his hand in her strong grip and allows him to haul her up into the hovering plane. "Transmission's done," she reports. "You and Sam?"

"Both here, both fine." Well, for certain values of fine: Barnes half-beat the life out of him and his back is a mass of knots, to say nothing of how the healing fractures in his face and neck itch like the world's worst case of pins and needles. "Tony's up in the cockpit, and we have Barnes."

Her skepticism is clear in the slant of her brow, but she says nothing as she follows him into the passenger compartment, heels dangling from her hand. She falls into a seat next to Sam and straps herself in, brows rising as she spots the crumpled wing and parachute nestled between Sam’s feet.

"Ouch, got your wings clipped, I see.”

Sam rolls his eyes and pokes a finger at what appears to be shoulder pads sewn into her blue suit jacket. "Yeah, but at least I didn't have to dress like someone off the set of  _ Dynasty _ ." 

Natasha laughs. "Fair enough. You got a protein bar?"

"We're all here," Steve calls forward to Tony, who sketches an ironic salute and turns the quinjet towards New York. 

Steve gingerly lowers himself into a seat on Barnes' side of the passenger compartment, making sure to leave an empty seat between them. Wouldn't do to make him feel crowded, especially after how he'd followed Steve and Tony onto the jet without resistance and allowed himself to be patted down for weapons, the various knives stashed on his person tossed into a weapons locker keyed to Steve's biometrics. 

Barnes - Bucky - sits ramrod straight to his left, his head bowed, smoke-stained face half-hidden by tangled dark hair. His bloody and bruised hands rest atop his knees, palms up, fingers half-curled: a pose of placation or submission. Steve's not sure if Bucky even knows which is which, if he recognizes the difference at all. His left arm, put out of commission with a wrist cuff that disrupts the systems within, clicks with every minuscule rise and fall of his shoulders, but if not for that, most people would believe him dead, held in position only by the passenger harness. There's a hint of pheromones in his scent, but they’re rancid, years old, and Steve's almost grateful for the overwhelming overlay of smoke. Still, there's the promise of compatibility there, and if he turns his head just right, he can see the back of Bucky's neck, pale and vulnerable, framed in dark hair, and just peeking through his hair, the tip of an ear.

Bucky wouldn’t have passed for a typical omega in the forties - too tall and muscular even before the serum packed more height and muscle onto his lean frame, the line of his jaw and the stubble scattered across his cheeks unapologetically masculine - but then Steve was never anyone’s idea of an alpha. His stature and frail constitution went against every hidebound idea of what an alpha was supposed to be: so much so that no one believed him when he insisted that he could smell Mary Baker’s pheromones from across the hall. His cheeks heat at the memory. 

Ma hadn’t been able to afford the expensive hospital tests that could prove his dynamic, and so he’d resorted to defending his claim as best he could with his fists. Then he’d hit his first rut at nineteen - late, just like he always was to every milestone - and it’d nearly killed him, but at least he’d had proof.

Now Steve fits the standard. The few magazines that serve the alpha demographic tend to hold him up as some sort of Platonic ideal to aspire to - tall, decisive, strong, muscular - while he’s tried, over and over, to make it clear that he was always an alpha, no matter his size or shape. They don’t seem terribly interested in listening. Still, at least when he presented, dynamics were seen as a good thing, a marker of rare gifts. 

Far cry from today, when folks with dynamics can be called ‘throwbacks’ in polite company, to say nothing of the stereotypes heaped on alphas as violent knuckleheads and omegas as demure peacekeepers. Tony's stubborn refusal to act as other alphas did, to even identify himself in public as such, had infuriated him at first, until he’d realized that to do so would endanger Stark Industries. It was better for Tony, easier, to try and let people forget he was an alpha, that the technology that ran their world was designed by a supposed thuggish lout.

He can’t pull his attention away from Bucky, the long line of his throat where it dips beneath torn black leather, the unconscious grace of his bowed head. A chance, after all these years. He’s happy with Tony, of course - they challenge each other, push each other to view the world in different ways - and would have been content to live out their lives together, but there’s always been a wistful nostalgia in the back of his mind: an awareness that he never got to experience all of what being an alpha was supposed to be about. 

Still, nothing is guaranteed. He and Tony will have to prove their worthiness to Bucky, court him if he’ll allow it, and maybe, with luck and time, Bucky will accept them.

A sudden hiss breaks the reverie. Across the passenger compartment, Natasha leans forward, her eyes fixed on Bucky, her brow furrowed. Her gaze flicks from Bucky's left arm to the dulled leather of his boots, then lands on his face.

Before he can say anything, Natasha speaks, voice like a whip.

"Barnes."

Bucky raises his head, and even exhausted and red-rimmed, the silver-blue of his eyes takes Steve’s breath away. He meets Natasha's gaze without reaction, expression blank.

Natasha sucks in a deep breath, maintaining a thin veneer of calm, then says, "Instructor Yakov?"

Sam and Steve lock eyes in mutual bafflement. Sam shrugs.

It makes sense for Hydra to use Bucky to train their soldiers - the Howlies had rhapsodized about his tactics and sniping, and God knows Hydra couldn't have only used him to assassinate political enemies - but Natasha? Steve's never seen her with a rifle as long as he's known her. 

Bucky tilts his head. No flicker of emotion disrupts his impassivity.

Natasha presses her lips together until they turn white. She persists, "You were stationed at the Red Room training program in Novosibirsk in 1995. You trained the graduating class of Widows that year in sniping and hand-to-hand combat. Yelena and I were among them, you insisted we use iron sights on our rifles because you didn't want us to rely on laser sights to do the job for us - do you not remember?" She pauses, then says, half-shy, "You called me Natya."

Silence. Bucky's pale eyes shine empty as a mirror. His right hand twists, palm-down, and slides to rest on the seat beside him. With tiny, slow movements, near-imperceptible, he plucks up a fold of fabric on his pants to worry it between thumb and forefinger. That small patch of fabric gleams near-white, threadbare with what must be hours upon hours of nervous wringing: the only expression he permits himself, the only sign of humanity allowed.

"I don't remember. I'm sorry." His voice creaks, but there is nothing behind his words: no regret, no irritation, not even the supplication of someone hoping to avoid pain. Nothing breaks the icy calm etched on his face, yet a faint edge of acrid fear tinges the pheromones circulating around him. Steve forces down the urge to bare his teeth.

"You had a beard then, but I'm sure it was you. I remember that scar above your lip and the color of your eyes. Behind your back, we called you Koschei, Koschei the Deathless."

Bucky's fingers pause. He doesn't look away from Natasha's intent gaze, even for a moment. Knowing the direction the pain will come from is the only control he has. "I don't remember. I'm sorry," he repeats, the words like holy writ but without hope. 

Natasha sits back with a sigh. "I understand. No apologies necessary." She smiles at Bucky, whose response is to put his hand back on his knee and bend his head once more.

"Steve!" Tony calls from the cockpit.

"Better go check on him before he gets bored." Natasha bends to cleaning her Widow's Bites, while Sam texts his family, his thumbs a blur.

"Flying the quinjet always bores him," Steve says, but he obliges, creaking to his knees to limp to the cockpit. He ducks through the hatch to find Tony sprawled in the pilot's seat, his hair a mess. Tony’s still in the suit, the gauntlets on his lap and the helmet perched atop the instrument panel and projecting a holo-display.

"Steve, hey!" 

Even now, there's a catch in Steve's chest at the helpless fondness that ripples across Tony's face when he sees him. The corners of his eyes crease with the force of his smile, the dark incisive gaze softening into warmth, and his mouth twists into a disbelieving grin:  _ how did I get you?  _

Steve can only hope his face reflects the same wonder.

He bends to kiss Tony's upturned mouth and tilts his cheek into callused fingers. Tony's thumb skims too close to healing orbital bone, and he hisses between his teeth, pulling back. 

Tony flinches away. "Ah, shit, sorry-"

"It's fine, it's just taking longer to heal than normal." The co-pilot's chair cushions his battered frame like an old friend as he settles into it. Even crammed into the cockpit, there’s enough room to knocking his ankles into Tony's armored ones until Tony tangles their feet together with a grin, the guilt fallen from his face. Satisfied, Steve continues, "Barnes packs a real wallop."

"You ate, right?" Tony rummages through the center console with an alarming amount of clanking and popping from within. "I don't know if SHIELD keeps their quinjets stocked with protein bars." He pops back up, disgruntled. "Looks like the answer is no."

"Technically we stole this quinjet, and I'd be surprised if SHIELD stocked all their quinjets with Avengers-style pantries."

"Fury'll get it back," Tony waves it away, "and everyone deserves a snack after a fight."

Steve manages a smile at that, knowing exactly what Tony’s definition of ‘snack’ is. He's suffered through enough of Tony's green beverages to kill an elephant, all because smoothies are, for whatever reason, how his partner expresses concern. DUM-E is probably warming up the blender - several blenders - as they approach.

"What're you working on?"

Tony glances at the floating screen and scrubs at his forehead with a wince. "It's the files JARVIS filtered out from the data dump, everything pertaining to the Winter Soldier or Barnes. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but-"

"But?"

"It's about consent." Tony reaches out and flicks a finger through the screen. What look like miles of file names scroll past with dizzying speed, and Steve swallows. "I didn't want this information spreading without Barnes' permission, because there's got to be sensitive shit in here: videos, possibly mission reports, X-rays and CAT scans that I don't even want to look at because just the damn icons are bone-chilling, so on and so forth." The blue lines of innumerable recorded sufferings flicker in Tony's eyes. There's no hint of fondness or warmth in his expression now, only weariness. "But if this is about consent, then I shouldn't look at any of the files or filenames without his permission, and  _ Christ _ , Steve, I don't think he even knows what permission is!"

Probably, almost definitely true, and the knowledge hurts like a blade through the chest.

"Then don't look," Steve says. "He is, whether we like it or not, a prisoner of war. Geneva and Hague protect him from intimidation or violence, and invading his past by viewing these without his knowledge-"

Tony's gaze sharpens, and he interrupts, "The Geneva and Hague Conventions did jack shit to protect him for  _ seventy years _ . This data is the best thing we've got to help him now, even if it's without his permission." 

"Wait." Steve shakes his head. Tension wakes the healing knots in his back and spreads in red waves of pain down his spine. "You were the one who argued for his rights being violated if the data was published, and now you want to go through it on your own?"

"'Want to?' Absolutely not, just the image icons told me this isn't going to be a fun ride. More a nightmare-inducing one. We need to know what happened to him, Steve. For medical purposes, obviously - that arm looks like it's half-bolted onto him and I'd like to see what I can do there - but then God knows he's going to need psychological help, and on top of that the entire U.S. government is going to be hunting him once they've got confirmation he's real." Tony ticks off yet another thing on his raised fingers. "If he goes to trial - which is likely - we'll angle for a pardon, and the sad truth is that whatever hell is in here will be his best mitigating factor."

A futurist, as ever, his mind reaching for possibilities Steve hadn't even considered. Steve reaches out to grasp Tony's hand and fold his soot-stained fingers into his palm, cradling Tony's hand between his own bruised and bloodied ones. 

"Compromise?"

Tony's lips quirk in a tired smile. "My  _ favorite  _ word."

"Very funny. For now, can JARVIS pull just the things dealing with his medical condition? Records of procedures or injuries? We'll table dealing with the rest of the data dealing with non-medical materials until he can consent to us looking at it."

The offer hangs in the air, fragile. This - compromising, trying to navigate the narrow path between Tony's obstinate need for control and Steve's own hotheadedness - is still a new strategy, hard-won via several shouting matches and once, Pepper forcing them into a conference room and refusing to let them leave until she was satisfied with their ability to negotiate. It doesn't come easy, might never, but becoming and remaining the sorts of men who can stand at each other's sides is worth it.

Tony chews on the offer as the tip of the Manhattan skyline rises into view ahead. Even through the armor, his shoulders hunch in tension. No doubt there's a thousand more reasons for his perspective circulating in his mind, but at last, he sighs.

"Fine."

* * *

The asset doesn't need to look up to sense Stark and Rogers entering the passenger compartment. Their scents permeate the small space, and he tenses, flesh hand tight about his kneecap. The left arm remains dead weight, pulling at the anchors set into what lingers of his scapula and wrapped about his spine, and invasive waves of pain wash across his upper body with each breath.

Across the compartment, the Falcon and the Widow have unbuckled their harnesses and gotten up, equipment in hand, to descend the loading dock to Avengers Tower. Somewhere in the Tower, they've likely got a cell of some sort prepared for him, as to his knowledge Hydra were the only ones equipped with cryogenic technology. If the Avengers wish to interrogate him, they'll find themselves disappointed, but a captor's disappointment leads nowhere good. His fingers itch to have cloth between them once more.

Stark and Rogers' booted feet pause in his field of vision, bright against the dull black grating of the deck. The asset holds position, eyes fixed in deferential posture, hands loose to show no hint of defiance, but they say nothing, they give no orders - what do they  _ want _ ? 

He must be good. He must follow orders. They will tell him when to move and what to do, and until then he must maintain a compliant state.

"Hey, on your feet, we've got places to go and people to meet, and you probably need some food. Hope you like smoothies," Stark says.

The asset undoes the harness and stands, lifting his head to meet their gazes. Rogers' brow furrows in open concern, while Stark's grin is brittle around the edges. It requires far more effort than usual to keep his expression schooled and blank as gravity tugs the metal arm against his body. 

He misses the mask.

He follows the alphas off the quinjet and across the landing pad. While they walk, mechanical arms fold up from the surface beneath them to disassemble Stark's shining armor, leaving him only in ripped jeans and a T-shirt, vulnerable to anyone. They board a narrow elevator, where the asset takes position opposite the door and stares straight ahead.

Stark continues to ramble, "So technically, I guess, you're our prisoner at the moment - and  _ wow _ , that's something I thought I'd never say - but for now what that means is that your arm will remain nonfunctional until we can make sure it's not hiding anything terrible. And JARVIS will be keeping an eye on you, but he does that to everyone anyway."

"Except in the bathrooms," Rogers interjects.

Why the asset would care about anyone watching his maintenance is a mystery, much like many of his handlers' ideas. A faint twist of anger rises in his chest at the arm remaining nonfunctional, but those decisions are their right.

"Well,  _ yeah _ , of course, I'm not a pervert. Anyway. Just know that we're going to try to help you, and if you could do us the favor of staying on designated floors and not attacking anyone, that'd be great."

Stark looks like he expects a response. 

The asset nods.

Stark claps his hands together as the elevator doors open. "Fantastic, glad we agree on that. Let's get some food, and then I'll show you to your room." He sails forth from the elevator into a vast white and chrome space. The majority of this facility level appears to be communal: living room, kitchen, dining area. The Falcon's slicing tomatoes and washing lettuce at a sink while the Widow stands over a sizzling skillet at the stove, and seated at the island is a dark-haired man in rumpled clothing. The exterior walls are almost entirely transparent, and the asset hunches, instinct marking out the best sightlines for a sniper. 

"The windows are all two inches of lightweight bullet proof glass," Rogers says from beside him. He meets the asset's furtive gaze with a small smile. "It's a lot of open space, I know, but not much short of a Hulk or a vehicle-mounted weapon is getting through."

He enters the kitchen and the asset follows. The dark-haired man - ah, Banner, the Hulk - looks up, pushing his smudged glasses up his nose. 

"Hey, Steve." He turns to the asset, and his eyebrows rise almost to his curly hair. "That's the Winter Soldier?"

"Yeah," Stark says, rounding the island with two glasses full of something virulently green. "Barnes, or Bucky, I don't know, do you have a preference? This is Bruce Banner. Bruce, Barnes."

So they have given him a name as well. Fine. He will be Bucky Barnes for them. He has played many roles. This is only another.

Banner ignores the introduction entirely and hurries to the asset’s -  _ Bucky’s -  _ left side. "May I see your arm?" This appears to be an unusual occurrence; even the Widow has looked up from her bacon and is watching with narrowed eyes.

Bucky stares at Banner. The first thing he remembers learning, beyond all else, is that his body no longer belongs to him; he has no say in whether he lives or dies, is hit or held, what is done to him or left undone. 

Banner shrinks back, and Stark, coming level with him and handing one of the green drinks to Rogers, searches Bucky’s face for something.

"Seriously, yes, no?"

"You won't get an honest answer from him," the Widow says, her voice low, "and he can't consent right now. But if it's medically necessary, you should go ahead and do it."

Banner reaches for the metal arm and lifts it enough to feel the weight of it, how it pulls at Bucky's side, forcing him to lean against its tug. He swears under his breath. "Can we go to the med floor? I don't know if HIPAA applies here, but all the same, I'd rather not do this in public."

"Sure," Stark says. His expression twists again, an unfamiliar expression of hurt crossing his face. He offers Bucky the green drink. "Here you go. Green juice, lots of protein powder, if you're anything like Steve you probably need to refuel."

As they board the elevator again, Bucky takes the green juice Stark ordered him to consume and drinks it down in two large gulps. If there are contaminants or poisons or sedatives, he need not care; the serum and many rounds of exposure testing have taught him to process most chemicals. The taste is palatable, the texture thick.

"Oh, look, Steve,  _ someone  _ appreciates my smoothies," Stark says. 

"Hey, I drink them, don't I?"

The doors open again on a medical wing. Immaculate examination tables and other sorts of equipment crowd the visible cubicles, and further down the hallway, a doorway leads to a surgical suite. No chairs.

Banner leads the way off the elevator, and Stark follows, the two of them already engrossed in an argument. 

Bucky swallows. It is important he be in good working order, maintained in proper condition - that is how he knows he is useful, is wanted - but maintenance is painful. Degrading, almost: how easily he can be opened up, his body a curiosity. 

Rogers, who's been waiting for him to exit, sniffs the air. His pupils constrict.

"Guys." His voice crosses the space between them like a sniper's bullet and makes both Banner and Stark swing around. "We can't go in there."

"Why?" 

Rogers frowns at the two of them, then gestures at Bucky. "Seriously, you can't _smell_ him? The fear pheromones?"

"All I'm smelling is the excellent air my HVAC filtered for us," says Stark, taking a step back towards the elevator. His eyes dart between them, brow seeming permanently furrowed by Bucky's presence in his tower. "Seems the serum's helping you out there." He catches Bucky's gaze and holds it, his dark gaze serious. "Is this frightening you? I get it, doctors, ugh, hospitals are even worse. We can go somewhere else-"

In answer, Bucky steps off the elevator. Tension seeps up his spine and neck and tightens the muscles in his body, and it's the effort of several steps to loosen into compliance again. Even a rigid posture can be interpreted as defiance with a difficult handler. He crosses the hallway to Stark and Banner and waits for Banner to point him to a cubicle.

"Is it all right if Tony and Steve stay?" Banner asks. "They can stand outside if you'd rather."

The answer Banner's looking for is obvious. "They can stay."

"All right. Hop up on the table, if you would."

Bucky takes position. His right hand begins to roll the cloth between its fingers, a tell, too honest-

"Are you all right with removing your upper body clothing so I can see how deep this goes?"

They keep disguising their orders in the form of requests, like that makes it better. Like he is supposed to be pleased by it. HYDRA technicians - not many, but a few - would do the same. There was always one right answer.

He undoes the various zippers and velcro ties on his ballistic vest and shrugs it off, then reaches for his sweat-stained undershirt and pulls it off as well.

A long and strained silence in the cubicle as the three men look him over, all his scars, this mutilated map of his forgotten history. They look at him like a horror, a testament. His nose burns with the scent of Stark and Rogers' anger: charred wood, scorched metal, the aftermath of war.

" _Shit_ ," Stark says, and his voice rings like a bullet. Rogers jerks around and exits the cubicle.

Banner wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes, very wide, flash green.

Moving slowly, he picks up the metal hand in both of his once more and lifts until Bucky's arm is horizontal, then lets the arm drop back to its hanging position with unfamiliar care. "This thing is forty to fifty pounds at  _ least _ , and look how much of his shoulder it takes up: nearly eighty percent of his clavicle, I'd bet almost all of his scapula. It's probably anchored to his sternum and spine, those are the only bones in the area strong enough to bear the weight, but with that local EMP on the prosthesis, it's pulling his entire body out of alignment." He rounds back to face Bucky, his expression grave. "Are you in pain?"

This question, Bucky understands. This procedure, he knows. Relief fills him as he reports,

"My levels of pain, hunger and thirst are sub-optimal."

Stark closes his eyes, then opens them. They shine, rimmed with red. "Yeah." His voice cracks. "I bet they are." 

Somewhere far down the hall, Rogers punches through a door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, and if you feel so inclined, please leave comments, criticism, or kudos!


	4. Chapter 4

Tony swallows down bile and flicks the video file to one side, where it joins the other files floating in holographic space, silent and serene.  
  
"JARVIS, tag that one: 1977 to 1980. Dynamic research."  
  
The file brightens into blue, then subsides.  
  
Tony takes a deep breath and pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes. Christ. He'd known Hydra to be sick fucks, but it's worse to have it confirmed in footage and scans, to watch how their files go from old carbon paper to inkjet printers to PDF scans, juddery black-and-white footage to HD color. Decades. They'd had Bucky decades.  
  
"That bad, huh."  
  
He startles and twists to find Steve, Bruce, and Sam in the glass-walled lab antechamber. Sam's got his mangled wings draped over his shoulder.  
  
"I can’t go into the details, privacy and all that, but come on in." Tony gestures for JARVIS to let them in, turning in his chair towards the floating outline of a human form projected on the wall. The entire left arm and enormous patches of the rest of it glow with color-coded dots and lines. As they spot the diagram and Steve takes a few steps towards it, Tony creaks out of his chair to take Sam's wings and place them gently on a work table nearby. 

“I’ll get these sorted, and I care about you very much, but shoo, private info floating around here.”

Sam rolls his eyes, says, “Sir, yes, sir,” and returns to the elevator. He nods to Steve as the doors close, which - though he’ll never admit it - warms the long-dead recesses of Tony’s heart. Good on Steve, he needs some friends outside the Avengers.

Tony joins Steve at the wall, where he’s perusing the diagram. "Those are all the quote-unquote medical procedures I've been able to figure out so far. The documentation starts in 1945 and looks pretty complete through the end of that year; Zola's notes state that they had lab space and materials for the first prosthesis provided by an Italian cell of Hydra."  
  
"So the arm socket must be coded to '45," Bruce says. He touches it, then steps back as pictures and diagrams and notes expand into view: broken-open shoulder, jagged bone, twisted loops of wire around a rib. Nothing about anesthesia, of course - the Axis had been starving for supplies by then.  
  
"Yep."  
  
Steve tears his attention away from the cruelty splashed across the wall with an effort. His jaw is cut glass, a muscle twitching beneath his ear, and his anger permeates the room with a scent like an oncoming storm. "How'd you even notice the arm was pulling him off-balance, anyway? Got another higher degree in kinesiology or something we don't know about?"  
  
"No! No, I think the three I've got are more than enough," Bruce says, scratching the back of his neck. "It's, uh, kind of embarrassing, but do you remember those films they took of you before the serum, and then again before you shipped out?"  
  
Steve's brow furrows. "The ones where I couldn't run or do a push-up?"  
  
"Well, that's just in the pre-serum footage, but yeah, that. I got help from a kinesiology post-grad in analyzing your movement and strength as part of my grant application to the Department of Defense for the gamma experiments. Turned out that she knew a lot of interesting stuff about posture and stride and that sort of thing, and I've held onto some of it. You seriously didn't notice how Bucky had to compensate for the arm with his hips?"

"If we had, we would've changed the restraint earlier." They've swapped it out for a skintight bracelet on the right wrist, made of nearly unbreakable material. The inside of the bracelet is lined with microneedles to deliver a sedative, should it be necessary. Not that any sedative is going to keep Bucky down long, but it should give them time to restrain him more securely before he wakes up. 

“Good point.” Bruce scans the rest of the diagram, then steps back, expression queasy. “I’m out of my depth here, and like you said, privacy. I’m going to head to my lab. Let me know if you need anything.”

“Will do, string bean.”

Once the glass between Tony and Bruce’s lab has turned to opaque, Tony glances up at Steve. “All right. Shoot.”

"What happened to his nose?" Steve asks, tapping the orange patch on the wall. Black and white photographs of stained microscope slides expand into silent life, each slide coupled with a few scanned notecards of Cyrillic cursive.  
  
Tony glares at the cursive in silent loathing - he'd had to upgrade a few of JARVIS' visual processors to cope with that gibberish - before he turns back to Steve. "I'll take my best shot at guessing why, but who knows? His medical records have gaps of several years in the 50s, 60s, and the late 80s up through the mid-90s, when control of the project rotates between two Soviet cells and a few American ones, none of whom like each other much. A lot of the Soviet-era files are probably still in the State Archives of the Russian Federation; I'd be surprised if they were digitized yet." The Russians have been damnably slow to move to modern archival standards, and all the hacking in the world, even if done by him, is useless if the materials are still on paper.   
  
He taps a few other points on the silhouette to pull more information onto the wall. "Anyway, long story short, it seems like for the duration of the Winter Soldier Project, there's a constant push and pull between acceptance of his dynamic and repression of it. Some project directors - Zola being one of them - think they can use his dynamic for their own ends, and try things like letting him cycle without a partner or tools." He bites out those last words, the idea still clawing at him, even now. 

Tony went through it once, right after he presented as an alpha, and just the memory makes his gut clench. He’d lost ten pounds from fever and lack of appetite, and the insomnia during it had left him so exhausted he couldn’t get out of bed for three days. It’d been bad enough that dear old dad, horrified, had discreetly given him money to buy his own supplies. 

Steve breathes a curse, voice steel, tinged with tired anger. People used to die from it back in his day, and he almost did. He survived by going through them at some charitable hostel where they gave him a locked room and supplies to ride it out, and even then it was a near thing. He doesn't talk about it much.  
  
There's a reason Steve always says his favorite invention of the 20th century is the hormonal implant.  
  
" _Anyway_ ," Tony goes on, all too ready to get away from the subject, "in the early years, when Bucky's still pushing against their control, some early directors put him through cycles unaccompanied to see if they gain more compliance. One really sick asshole named Artemyov, two or three directors after Zola, has him impregnated to see if any of the serum's effects can be passed down genetically. No surprise when that one doesn't pan out, but another director tries it again in the 80s. A few try to bond him artificially with Hydra alphas so they have a stronger hold, but that one doesn't work either. They tried the hormonal implant on him, but the serum lets his body reject it."  
  
Tony barrels past any of Steve's attempts to interject, because _fuck_ having to go back to what Artemyov did, what all of those anonymous Hydra scientists did. There had been videos of Americans, people he might have known, treating Bucky like a thing - something less than nothing. 

"Pierce becomes project director five years ago, and he orders the scientists to suppress heat cycles and prevent bonding; says it's a liability. They put Bucky in cryo during most of his cycles, and for the bonding, they cauterized the inside of his nose to block pheromones. The epithelium grew back, they tried it again, failed again, and went with dousing his masks in odors to keep any pheromone traces out."  
  
"Wait, wait, go back-" Steve says.   
  
Fuck _that_. Tony jabs his finger to open the files pertaining to the chair. There's blueprints, photos, slides of neurons shocked into disorganized sprawls.  
  
" _And_ to keep him docile and compliant, because if he's active for too long he starts to regain his memories, they do something like ECT but without anesthesia. Reset his brain, more or less, make him start from the ground up." He can't stop talking, words pouring in a furious torrent from his mouth, as if by forcing others to see he can purge the horrors from his own mind.  
  
"So in short," Tony gestures at the human shadow, all the lines and blots shrouding it in a history of suffering, "it's _fucked_ , okay? It's all fucked." His eyes burn, and it strikes him, all of a sudden, how much his hands hurt, and he forces himself to unclench them. "What they did to him- I don't have words for it. I don't _want_ to have words for it."   
  
Steve steps closer and slings an arm around his shoulders, pulling him close and letting him settle into the warm solidity of his partner's side. The side of his face prickles with sudden heat as Steve sighs, then brushes his jawline against his temple, mingling scents. It helps, but not enough.  
  
"I don't know where to start," he admits. "I don't know how to help him."  
  
"I think just that is a start." Steve kisses the top of his head and embraces him fully, and Tony lets him. "I'm sorry," he says, and the rare apology thrums through his chest and into Tony. "I shouldn't have let you do this alone."  
  
"It's been a bit much," Tony mutters into Steve's chest. "Bad memories."  
  
Steve's breath hitches. His hand, gentle where it rests on the back of Tony's neck, tightens. "Are you all right?"  
  
"Right now? No. But I will be." He picks his head up to meet Steve's gaze, all creased brow and soft eyes. "Trust me on this one, okay, and let's go see if your buddy Sam has any advice."  
  
They board the elevator, and Steve presses his forehead to Tony's. They breathe the same air, cocooned in the scent of safety, partnership, love. "All right."  
  
Sam raises his hands in defense as soon as they step into the common room with hopeful expressions, and whoa, he must have a spine of steel, because no one stands up to Steve's hangdog look.  
  
"Nope. Nope, nope, _nope_ , I see where you're going, and I get why you're going there, but trust me, I am not qualified for this."  
  
Steve frowns. "You do therapy at the VA, right?"   
  
Tony snags one of the leftover BLTs Natasha and Sam made and stuffs half of it in his mouth in one go. Turns out diving into the archives of a Nazi cult with dreams of world domination leaves you hungry.  
  
"Yeah, but that's group cognitive behavioral therapy; it's manual-based, short-term, and you've got to have a group of patients with similar backgrounds." Sam jerks his head at the hallway to the guest suites, where they've left Bucky to make himself at home. "Call me crazy, but I'm pretty damn sure we're not going to get anyone with a background like Barnes."  
  
"That's not the only way, though, is it?" Tony asks.  
  
Sam shakes his head. "VA's approved a few others called EMDR and PET. I’m not qualified to perform EMDR, and PET - Prolonged Exposure Therapy - is, uh, controversial. It's all about retelling traumatic events in a safe environment until they lose their power, but let's just say that it either works or it really, really doesn't. There's a couple other modalities out there, but those are the only ones the VA's given gold star rating." He turns back towards Steve. "Besides, some experts say going over all this trauma in detail isn't helpful for people with as much baggage as Barnes has."  
  
Tony takes another bite and chews, interested despite himself. He's never been to therapy for any of the shit that's happened to him, though Obi had forced him to go to a few sessions after he got out of rehab the first time: looked good for the tabloids, he'd said.  
  
"Besides," Sam says, "I got to get back to DC eventually, and Barnes'll probably need someone local who can respond to crises immediately. I can give you a list of trauma therapists with good reputations who work here, though."  
  
"Okay." Steve straightens his slumped shoulders. "I'd appreciate that. By the way, you heard anything?"  
  
Sam glances down the hall at the closed door at the end. No shadow disrupts the faint trace of light at the bottom, and Bucky hasn't put the water bottle or Tupperware of food they gave him outside. "Quiet as a mouse. JARVIS hasn't said anything to make me worry, though. He probably went to sleep, just like you two should do. JARVIS'll say something if we need to wake up, right?"  
  
Plate in the dishwasher, Tony rounds the island and snags Steve by the shoulder. "I like that plan."  
  
Steve lets himself be moved, and as Tony leads the way to the elevator, his brow furrows once more, nose twitching.  
  
"Hey, Tony?"  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"I know it's not March yet, but... I think your cycle's coming early."  
  
Well, fuck.

* * *

Bucky surveys the room he has been assigned. The only word that comes to mind is _soft_ , which is odd. He has never been assigned soft things: his clothing stiff, his vest heavy. The bedspread, pillows, and rug are various shades of gray and blue, while the furniture consists of pale wood. Across from the door, there's a vast panel of glass, the view beyond the glittering skyline of New York.   
  
Absent of further direction from a handler, he begins the post-mission checklist on his own. Some handlers - the foolish ones - had thought him incapable of independence or autonomy, and those had been pulled from the project in haste. He would have been a poor weapon if he could not make tactical decisions in response to parameter changes.  
  
He pulls off his smoke-tainted boots and lines them by the door. The alphas would not like for him to dirty their carpet. The rest of his clothes he removes and folds, an unexpectedly difficult task, as his right arm is stiff from the amount of painkillers Banner injected him with. Apparently it was of vital importance that his pain levels be reduced from an 8 to a 3. No, he must not think that way - questioning handlers leads nowhere good.  
  
"You may place your clothing in the laundry chute, should you wish it to be cleaned," JARVIS says from hidden speakers. "New clothes are available in the bureau to your right."  
  
He must not forget he is being watched.   
  
The bathroom is austere white tile and glass, nothing like the cold concrete bunkers he’s used to. He glances aside at the mirror to catalog the healing bruises, then steps into the shower. Hm. He has a choice in temperature. The cold water he tries first stirs something unpleasant in his mind, a flash of snow and ice. He dares to turn it to lukewarm, and, finding it satisfactory, washes.   
  
The back of his neck itches, and a low thrum of heat rolls beneath his skin. He keeps sniffing for Stark and Rogers' scents and inhaling only the herbaceous odor of the shampoo and body wash provided. The scent is inoffensive, but it isn't them. He's never had this reaction to any of the alphas Hydra provided him, and his lips roll back from his teeth in an instinctive snarl at the idea of any alphas but Rogers and Stark touching him.  
  
A bright spike of white pain stabs through his skull at the momentary defiance. Hydra trained him well.  
  
He dries himself and finds the bureau JARVIS mentioned. It is full of more soft things: loose sweatpants, various shirts, all in more calming shades. He dresses, avoiding the whites, and tests the bed with a hand: soft to the point of discomfort. The closet floor, in contrast, is hard, the room bare and dark, just deep enough for him to stretch out in, flat on his back, hands at his side. The confinement eases the slow-boiling panic beneath his skin. Too many choices.  
  
Better to focus on the mission.  
  
"JARVIS?"

With his eyes closed, the lights off, and the noise of the outside world muffled, he can almost pretend he's back in the cryo chamber, awaiting sedation.  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"Intelligence on Bucky Barnes."  
  
JARVIS reads out in a soft monotone voice all the information that made up Barnes' life: date of birth, genealogy, record of military service, a few sentimental interviews with the Howling Commandos regarding the sacrifice Barnes made at Azzano. Nothing pertinent to his mission, nothing that tells him how James Buchanan Barnes walked or talked or lived, and Stark and Rogers, as of yet, don't seem interested in providing further intel.   
  
Perhaps this is a test. When he was going through recalibration and maintenance, there were times when he would be required to respond or not respond to available alphas, though none of them had tugged at his chest the way Stark and Rogers do. This was sometimes a failure and sometimes a success, and he had never known what to expect.   
  
He remembers, or thinks he remembers, rage at the directors' inconsistency. He swallows saliva, nausea at the idea of rebellion thick and awful in his throat.   
  
A blurred picture forms against the inside of his eyelids where his eyes roll slowly back and forth in the endless wait for sleep: blue eyes, dark hair, a smaller hand in his. Scraped knuckles. A mouth curled in a smile, exposing darkness where a childhood tooth had come free. His mouth wants to shape a name without his consent.   
  
"JARVIS." His whisper is too loud.   
  
"Yes?"  
  
"I remember a sister.”  
  
"You had two," JARVIS says, and at that Bucky turns away, face to the wall, and thinks of nothing.

* * *

Bucky springs to his feet at the thud of feet in the hallway. It's dark, near-silent, not cold - not cryo - is he being decommissioned-  
  
His heartbeat startles upward, a harsh cloud of fear pheromones slicking the back of his neck, before he chokes the panic down. He snatches a cloth off the shelf nearest him and swipes the scent off himself, dropping the cloth and bolting into the bedroom. Yes. He remembers this now. Alphas, Stark Tower, a prisoner. His cell waits in the gray light of dawn, the city beyond just beginning to wake. Bucky sinks into a passive stance in the middle of the room just as Rogers' shadow fills the gap beneath the door. His scent and the smell of coffee follow.  
  
"Bucky?" Just at the sound of Rogers' voice, tension ebbs from the asset - _Bucky's_ body.   
  
"Yes."  
  
"May I come in?"  
  
Bucky allows no reaction to the irritating fiction that he has choice. Handlers see and hear everything. He learned that in blood.  
  
"Yes."  
  
Rogers fills the doorway, mugs of coffee in both large hands. His clothes are soft gray fabric, his feet hidden in thick woolen socks, the effect confusing contrasted against his blackened eyes and the thick webbing of bruising around his neck. Still, he's healed from most of the damage Bucky did, faster than Bucky's second-rate serum allows.  
  
"Good morning," Rogers says, entering the room. His gaze darts to the pristine bed and its undented pillows, before he blows out a sigh and crosses out of Bucky's view.

Bucky swallows down the pressing need to twist, to see, because it betrays his mistrust, and weapons believe in their handlers. Behind him, the couch groans, and the mugs of coffee clink onto the low coffee table, muffled by napkins.  
  
"At ease."  
  
Bucky pivots to find Rogers on the couch, one arm spread across its back. Steam from the mugs drifts upward, past bruising, the darkness of his beard, the blue of his eyes. Rogers' mouth quirks in something sad, a little wry, and he nods at the chair across from him.   
  
Bucky sits. Relief unfurls inside him. Orders. Expectations. Clarity of purpose. What he's built for.  
  
"If I handed you that cup of coffee," Rogers says, his eyes so intent they burn, "what would you do?"  
  
"Follow the implied order and drink it."   
  
Rogers cocks his head. "All of it? No matter how hot?"  
  
"I've healed from full-thickness burns before."  
  
"And if there were poisons?" Rogers presses.   
  
Is this a test of his honesty? Of whether he'll be truthful about his capabilities? Or did they simply fail to acquire a copy of his various operations manuals?  
  
"My body has proven itself resistant to all common poisons over multiple rounds of testing," Bucky says. "Were there poison in it, I would be incapacitated for anywhere from one to twenty-two hours, but not killed."   
  
Rogers closes his eyes, and a long silence, tinged with the scent of grief, envelops them both. Red-gold dawn light creeps onto the floor and licks at the toes of his socks.  
  
His eyes still closed, Rogers asks, "Do you _enjoy_ coffee?"  
  
Bucky's fingers bite into the thin cloth of his borrowed pants. A fold finds itself between his right thumb and forefinger. He struggles to keep his voice even as he says, "I've had it before."  
  
"But did you enjoy it?"  
  
The cloth rolls faster between his thumb and forefinger. Friction heats the skin. His back coils into a mass of knots. The question looms like a bullet waiting for the target.  
  
Enjoyment. To enjoy something is dangerous, makes it a target, another lever of control. There had been a cryonics medical technician who'd forget to put his gloves on when performing pre- and post-cryo checks, and his hands had been warm. He'd touched Bucky without fear, gentle in the way he inserted needle and tubes, and his hands had been warm.  
  
Bucky had been too obvious. He'd asked after the technician once, when he'd woken to a team without him. Artemyov made sure to let him know that the technician would be reassigned, and indeed, he never saw the technician with the warm hands again.  
  
"Bucky?"  
  
He lifts his blurred gaze from the coffee to meet Rogers' eyes. Rogers' brow is furrowed.  
  
"Bucky, you're bleeding."  
  
So he is. The cloth between his fingers lies heavy with blood, his torn fingertips a dull drumbeat of pain.  
  
He swallows. Frustration presses at his temples, slices down the back of his neck.  
  
Rogers leans across the coffee table, his right hand open, palm-up. There's gunpowder ground into the lines of his palm, and a thick callus along the edge of his right hand where he hurls the shield. His left hand holds one of the cloth napkins he brought with him.  
  
Bucky meets Rogers' eyes. Dawn slices across his battered face in rivulets of light, illuminates the bruises his own bloody hand put there, and yet. And yet.  
  
"Please," Rogers says, and Bucky lays his hand into Rogers' grip.  
  
His hands are warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reviews, comments, and criticism are all welcomed and appreciated!


	5. Chapter 5

Steve had been surprised to learn that Bellevue Hospital had survived this long, and even more so to find it mentioned on Sam's list.

"Yeah, man, they house one of the top torture rehab programs in the country. There's another great one in Boston you might be able to get help from, if Bellevue doesn't work out," Sam had said, tapping another name on the short list. Too short, and Sam's gaze had gone soft and sad as he said,

"Dealing with PTSD among our veterans and victims of torture,  _ really _ dealing with it, would need us to recognize our own culpability, what we've asked our people to live with on our behalf. Recovery's not glamorous or simple, and it's not something fixed with a donated house and a Veteran's Day parade."

"Savage, I like it," Tony had replied, before picking up the phone and calling the director of the torture rehab.

Several therapists refused to sign the NDA before consulting, Bucky went somehow even more still and silent at the idea of working with an alpha therapist, and that has left Steve and Tony crammed into a small disused office on the Avengers common floor, staring at the therapist Bucky had deemed acceptable.

Tony, to Steve’s left, reeks of agitation and his oncoming rut. He should really be sequestered at this point to prevent him exploding on someone, but he’s insisted on being here, and Steve isn’t going to gainsay his control. He's out of his customary armor of a three-piece suit, exchanged for gray sweats that don’t irritate him further and a scowl.

"I met with Mr. Barnes, who gave me permission to speak with you. I also read the medical history you sent over," Dr. Lee says from across the desk. She's unassuming, short, draped in a loose sweater and leggings, her black hair bound up in a bun. Omega and mated, and Steve really wishes he doesn’t know that - feels a bit rude - but his nose, well, it smells what it smells.

"Pretty bad, eh?" Tony says. His mouth twists. His shoulders hunch around his ears. Steve rests a hand on the corded muscle of his partner's thigh to quell his bouncing leg.

"Appalling." Dr. Lee's tone brooks no nonsense and reminds him of Peggy. "Absolutely hideous, what they've done to him."

"Can you fix it?"

She stills the restless motion of her pencil. "'Fix' is a strong word, Mr. Rogers. Post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly the complex type from which Mr. Barnes likely suffers, is a chronic condition; it's managed and treated more than cured. Trauma changes  _ everything _ : not just what you think about, or how you think about what you encounter, but your capacity to think at all. Right now, Mr. Barnes  _ isn't  _ thinking; he's living his life as if the trauma he endured is still ongoing, circling back in an endless loop."

"But it's over. Hydra isn't getting him back, we're seeing to that," Steve says. Clint, back from his farm upstate, and Natasha have gone on the hunt for Hydra cells, especially those connected to the Winter Soldier project.

Dr. Lee nods and taps her finger on the yellow legal pad to her left, where Bucky's cramped handwriting unfurls across clipped diagrams and number lines. "Of course, and if he were responding rationally, he would find that comforting. However, research has shown that no matter how much understanding we gain of how trauma affects our responses and beliefs, our logical brains are powerless to talk our emotional brains - our limbic systems, especially - out of their fear. Whether it's ‘reasonable’, whether it's ‘real,’ doesn't matter." 

She leans forward, her gaze steel. There's a sudden ferocity to her that makes Tony go rigid next to him. "For the foreseeable future, everyone who interacts with Mr. Barnes must understand this. Anyone who has suffered what he has suffered should be dead, many times over, and without his serum, he would be. His trauma is overwhelming. It defies belief. But we  _ must  _ believe him, and we must suspend reality while we deal with him. We must accept, every moment of every day, that he does not always live alongside us. His realities exist simultaneously: our present and his past, and all the pain and trauma it holds.  _ He is not free of it _ . He may never be."

Left to his own devices over the past two days, Bucky has spent most of his time in his closet, a rigid shadow on the floor, ceaselessly poring over the documents JARVIS dug up for him. He started with the basics of his own life, a life he still seems to have no recognition of, and then spiraled out from there: a microfiche floor plan of the tenement he grew up in, an obsessively detailed description of what it was like to enlist in the Army during the 40s. Steve isn’t sure how much he’s slept, if at all, and he eats the food they give him with no reaction to the taste whatsoever.

"I also had a question for you two," Dr. Lee says.

"Shoot," says Tony.

"When I asked him to identify himself, he wrote 'Asset' before he wrote 'James Buchanan Barnes.'" She turns the legal pad towards them. 'Asset' is struck through with a thick, jagged line, and the full name following it is in jerky script, as if painstakingly copied from a blurry scan. "I asked him if he was James Barnes. He said he’d been assigned the identity."

“Yeah, that’s typical.” Steve sighs. “He goes by Bucky because it’s what we’ve been calling him, but I don’t think he’s convinced that he really  _ is  _ James Barnes. He spends all his time reading about Bucky or the Depression or what-have-you, and whenever he sees me, he has some minute question about something from the war, but it doesn’t seem to be jogging his memories. The only thing I can think of is that maybe he’s looking at it like a cover identity and he’s trying to make it believable?”

Dr. Lee laughs, though there’s no humor in it. “At the moment, his singular motivation is trying to avoid being recaptured by Hydra, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s trying to learn to become the person you all say he is. If he complies with your requests, he remains here, with all the protection that implies.”

The scent of Tony's anger - hot metal, ozone, biting like the vicious edge of a blade - overwhelms Steve’s senses, and Dr. Lee, across from him, cringes back. Steve knocks his shoulder into Tony, who cuts off the scent with a wince and shoves himself back into the couch. His hands twist into the cloth of his sweats.

" _ Shit _ , sorry. That’s not- that’s not normal for me, I'm not usually this way, I promise," Tony says, voice raw. He hates any loss of face, takes pride in being able to hide his dynamic when needed, and now he's losing his self-control, bit by bit, as the rut encroaches.

"I understand," Dr. Lee says. "If it were someone I cared for that we were talking about-" she leaves it there, her gaze turned to the legal pad where Bucky has recorded pain levels, nausea levels, sleep.

"What should we do?" Typical Tony: immediately demanding concrete actions, a plan that can mask his fear.

Dr. Lee looks up, and for the first time, Steve notices the faintest trace of reddened skin and salt tracks beneath her eyes. "Understand that right now he's in a state of learned helplessness. He's spent years knowing that he can't fight or flee, so his only option has been to freeze, to shut down and try to distance himself from whatever's happening. And because he is so good at distancing himself from anything objectionable, because he thinks his safety is at stake if he doesn't give you what you want, he is likely to do anything he thinks will keep you on his side-" her eyes sharpen, "-and  _ yes _ , that does extend to sexual favors."

Another explosive burst of lightning-steel-rage, Tony's fists clenched, the muscle of his jaw rolling beneath his beard. The rasp of teeth.

"Understood," Steve manages.

"Remember, when he finally does feel safe, he's going to lash out. He is going to be angry, and he is going to say hurtful things. The best thing you can do then is understand, offer empathy, but not condone." She cracks a thin smile. "Trauma doesn't excuse being an asshole." 

"For now, the best thing you can do is be there, as nonjudgmental listeners, as people who know that he can be better than he's been made to be."

Tony nods, decisive, his gaze sharp, voice clear. "Absolutely."

They leave the office with another meeting date and time and a list of books to read, but Tony, who's normally all about digesting information on topics of interest, strides to the elevator without even a word to JARVIS to order the books.

Steve takes up a spot by Tony's side where he's staring out the glass elevator shaft at Manhattan and the harbor beyond. His eyes narrow, dangerous, and the elevator reeks of frustration, anger, an oncoming swell of need like a storm heaving into view over restless waters. It's been years since Steve's smelled his partner this rattled, full of rage and want and unable to do anything about it. When he glances aside, Tony's hands are curled into white-knuckled fists, and a tremble runs beneath his skin.

"I want-" Tony starts, before he cuts himself off with a grunt, shaking his head. The elevator lifts into silent motion.

Steve doesn't look at him, even his reflection in the glass, but aims his attention far out into the harbor, to Ellis Island, to the Statue of Liberty, the old hope. Sometimes it's easier for Tony this way, for Steve to pretend he isn't watching, isn't attuned to every flinch and breath and motion, that he doesn't know Tony's face and voice the same way he knows his shield fits his hand. 

Tony hums with coiled energy beside him, explosive, war contained in a human frame. "I want to find everyone who ever contributed to the Winter Soldier project.  _ Everyone _ . The apparatchiks in the CIA who knew, they had to have known. There's too many assassinations fitting the Winter Soldier's profile that benefited the U.S's aims in the Cold War. The accountants who crunched numbers for DoD black budgets and never asked about the line items siphoning money into sites in the USSR. The doctors, the nurses, the people who woke him up to kill and put him back down again to freeze-" he pauses, then goes on, voice thick,

" _ Generations _ of them.  _ Seventy years' _ worth of them. I want to find them all, everyone who ever turned Bucky against himself, and I want them to  _ hurt _ ." His eyes gleam flat black in the reflection, cold and dark as an Arctic ocean. "I want to drag them and everything they've done out into the light, but more than that, I want them to hurt for taking a good man and turning him against himself." His gaze darts to Steve’s in the glass, and anguish creases his brow. "I don't even know how much of this is rut and how much of this is me, but I think- I think it's mostly me, and I'm sorry because I know you'd never do any of that, never want that, but I do and I'm not sorry, too." He is still and cold and obscenely patient beside Steve, and when he speaks, his words are clear and adamant as any natural law. "Not sorry at all."

The elevator stops on the penthouse floor, and Steve says, "JARVIS, hold the elevator here, darken the glass."

"Yes, Captain."

"Tony." He catches Tony beneath the chin with a curled finger and lifts his face, leans in to press his forehead against Tony's, lined with care. "You think I don't want the same? That I don't hate Hydra for what they've done? I would hunt them down across continents. Don't be fooled by the uniform, you  _ know  _ who I am." Sometimes he feels Tony's the only one who knows who Steve Rogers really is, that he, from the moment he met Steve, saw straight to the wounded angry core of him.

"But I-" Tony's gaze dips, then flicks back to Steve. "All the 'Merchant of Death' things, they were great for PR, but I'm supposed to have gotten beyond it, and I thought I had. Then- then Bucky." 

Steve closes his eyes. Drops his hands to Tony's shoulders to feel the warmth of him, the rut sweat dampening his clothes. "I understand why you want them to suffer. I'd be lying if I said there's not a small part of me that wants that, too, but-" he opens his eyes and offers the only smile he can, "-I know that hatred would solve nothing except leading me to the easy way out. It'd cheapen what Dr. Erskine saw in me, and it'd defeat everything I've done to be a good man."

"You  _ are  _ a good man," Tony says instantly, his hands flying to cup Steve's jaw. "The best, and if you ever bring this up again when we argue I'm going to deny I ever said it."

"Noted, but Tony, I'm only as good as I choose to be. There's a difference between accepting the violent parts of me and giving them free reign, and it's that choice that I have to make, over and over again." He meets Tony's eyes, squeezes his shoulders. "I believe that, if you were confronted with everyone who ever made Bucky hurt, all lined up in a row for you, you'd make the same choice I would. You'd do the right thing."

Tony inhales a rough breath, tinged with a sob. "Christ, Steve, way to pin the moral burden on a guy."

"It's a talent," Steve agrees. A terrible clarity to have, and even more terrible to wield: to believe so strongly in the best of humanity, and to know himself so often disappointed. "JARVIS, doors, please."

The elevator doors open. Tony shakes himself, then grabs Steve by the wrist and hauls him towards the master suite. "Okay, soldier, you made me sad. You going to make it up to me?" He twists at the door and grins, all teeth and heat. Sweat darkens the hair at his temples, dampens the collar of his shirt. His cock rises beneath his gray sweatpants, twitches as Steve hooks his fingers in the waistband and leans down. Tony's eyes, pitch black, lock on Steve's mouth as Steve says, low,

"I intend to."

Tony yanks him into a kiss and shoves him through the door.

Steve jolts awake as Tony rolls off the bed and stumbles to the shower. Their bedroom is a wreck: clothes strewn about the room, an open and mostly-used tube of lubricant occupying the nightstand, a knotting sleeve for alphas whose partners can't take their knot taking up residence at the foot of the bed. The room is drenched in Tony's scent, all predatory desire, and the sheets are almost definitely a lost cause.

And what a cause it was. Steve stretches to luxuriate in the soreness of his throat, his back, his ass. Tony's not able to work him over like this very often outside of rut, and this rut's been something else, as if Tony's been spurred to claim and protect what he can, knowing his potential partner has been kept from him, hurt in all the ways one can hurt a man.

Steam rolls out from the door, left open in blatant invitation, so Steve takes it, padding across the room to enter the bathroom. Tony's already in the shower, his hair slicked to his scalp, the water cascading over tanned skin freckled and marked with various scars, the dark trail of curly hair arrowing from the arc reactor down to his soft cock. He moves slowly, at ease in his body, satisfaction in every motion, and Steve leans against the door to watch, a grin pulling at his mouth.

It's taken years for Steve to shake Tony out of loathing his own rut. For so long, he saw it as a bestial, violent thing that took away the intelligence he's prided himself on all his life, and it took innumerable conversations to get him to view it as a gift, something to take pleasure in. This moment makes it all worth it.

"You're not as quiet as you think you are," Tony calls, turning to Steve. His eyes, eyelashes clumped with water, dart over Steve's naked form. They pause on the few marks he left that managed to stay overnight, lingering on where Steve's grown hard, not that it takes much these days, and darken in satisfaction. His cock twitches, begins to thicken.

He licks his lips, reaches out a hand for Steve and says, his voice a low rumble, "Come here."

"Only because I want to," Steve says, adoring the eyeroll it gets, and goes to him.

* * *

Bucky has become familiar with the toilet bowl over the past days. His stomach rolls with constant low-grade nausea that spikes upward after most meals, and only vomiting seems to ease the discomfort. Stark and Rogers keep giving him food, which is a familiar torture, if a rare one. Hydra handlers had better ways to teach him.

His mouth waters. The air reeks of acidity. He twists in time to retch up the last of breakfast, then flushes the toilet, washes his hands. His fingers itch for something sharp. He should know better than to want more than he's been provided, should be content with his arm and his training, but he isn't. Can't be, left as exposed as he is. He enters the bedroom, scans the nearby rooftops for any sniper emplacements; the only good thing about this building is how high up it is, which gives him visual superiority over all the surrounding buildings. The automatic scan reveals nothing but for ventilation, bird nests, white gravel. Vague memories of winter forests and MREs accompany his surveillance - he learned this before Hydra. 

The light stings his eyes, raw from sleeplessness. His rest is a fragile, fitful thing, broken at intervals by the strangling need to walk the perimeter, to check the surrounding windows. He checks his small perimeter multiple times a night, and returns to the closet to sleep sitting up, facing the door: easier to respond to an attack that way. 

Of course Stark and Rogers told him multiple times that no one would attack him here, but he's been told that before by others and found it a lie. Bucky has not seen Rogers or Stark in several days, and all JARVIS says is that they're "indisposed."

Normally he wouldn't concern himself with the whereabouts of his... He doesn't know what they are. They promise him safety, but cage him with a bracelet that takes away his arm. Give him unnecessary medical treatments papered over with 'diagnostics.' He's endured their clumsy attempts at interrogation disguised as conversation, offered them all the information he can. Knowledge of Hydra's workings had never been necessary, so they seemed disappointed by how little he knew. Yet they hadn't punished him, and for that, he's selfishly grateful.

He ducks into the closet to crouch before his forming memories. He's started diagramming what he's remembered on slips of paper that he sticks to the wall of the closet, the easier to move around into chronological order as more memories surface. Easier to contain them on finite paper, to not let them dig too deep.

The one he’d been working on before his nausea hit him rests on the closet floor, reading in shaky Cyrillic, 

_ Washington. Traitor. Vladivostok _ .

Gray sky. Smoke on the wind. A curled corpse black in the snow, the shape burning bodies take as tendons and muscles char and shorten. Thick drops of blood entangled in his hair. Dried and itching across his face. A USSR passport. Two IDs spattered with red, wiped clean to reveal 'Stark Industries,' the other 'SHIELD.'

This could be valuable. This could keep him safe.

"JARVIS. Location report."

"Doctor Banner is in his lab on the sixtieth floor. Miss Romanov and Mister Barton are not in the building. Thor remains off-world. Sir and Captain Rogers are in their suite." A beat, before JARVIS offers, already predicting Bucky's next question, "The common areas of this floor are empty."

Good. Bucky rolls his shoulders to try and ease the tension in them, then cracks open his door. No noise, or noxious odors that presage a trap. The living room is empty as JARVIS said, afternoon sunlight falling in pale golden rays onto the white furniture and pale wood floor, and he slips through the room and into the hallway leading to the Avengers' suites with only minor dread at the appalling openness of the room. More images flicker past: a mission briefing. A scrawled signature on yellow carbon paper - _Stark_.

He pauses at the dark door leading into Rogers' and Stark's suite. A faint tinge of humidity in the air against his bare feet. Voices within, one raised in a sudden peal of laughter, then the sound of furniture being moved, cloth whispering against itself.

"You may go in," JARVIS says, and Bucky opens the door, steps inside.

Someone has recently showered, he realizes as he inhales the heated and humid air - or someone has been manacled to a pipe and burned, boiling water across their back, skin blistering like a wet white bandage - gorge rises in his throat - 

Rut infiltrates every inch of his perception: the thick scent of lust, frustration, satiety, lazy pleasure - the smell of semen - an open bathroom door - t hem. They've dressed in a hurry, he notes, and the information filters through as if from another planet. 

Rogers' wet and ruffled hair shines like bronze in the dim light. Beads of water clump his eyelashes together. His lips are swollen, his pale throat littered with a trail of bruises. 

Stark's whole being screams predator. He's bent towards Bucky, his eyes near-black, heated, his mouth a slash of teeth, his hands up, reaching. The collar of his T-shirt, dark with sweat, gapes wide where he's yanked it over his head. His jeans sit low on slim hips, his zipper half undone, dark curls of hair visible, tan skin, a half-erection. 

Ah. A sudden jolt of terror and adrenaline, bitter on the back of his tongue, lightning in the spine, before he falls into the numbness, not even surprised enough to feel betrayed. This, at least, is easy. This is known. The unreality washes over him. 

One knee, then the other, meets the carpet beneath him. He tilts his head to meet Stark's gaze, and works his heavy dull arms behind his back, and waits. It takes so little of him to allow this to happen, if this small act will keep him here. The rest of him is in the cryochamber, cold, calm, silent, still.

Numb.

A hand shakes him.

"-ke up!" The voice is tinny and static-laden, like communications over a SCR-300 radio, Morita's radio,  _ 40 goddamn pounds we have to hump through these fucking hedgerows _ \- 

Bucky focuses back on reality and finds Stark and Rogers crouched before him. Rogers' hand leaves his shoulder, its owner pale, his mouth a thin and miserable line.

"Yes," Bucky says through tingling lips.

"What the  _ fuck  _ was that?" Stark's flailing gesture encompasses Bucky, the room, the whole world. "You just- you went away, it's been two minutes, and you opened your mouth- you thought-" he cuts off. His eyes widen, then narrow, and his voice is a pained whisper. "You thought I wanted-"

Bucky flicks his gaze towards his open zipper.

Stark jerks. His hands fly to his jeans and yank the zipper closed in a rattle of metal teeth. "Christ,  _ no _ , just, just ignore my dick, I'm coming off a rut and it doesn't know what's good for us, my dick cannot be trusted and you don't even want sex-"

"Do you want me to want it?" Bucky manages, slow, hesitant. Handlers haven't asked for this one in a while.

Stark trembles. The room's air is close and thick with rage. " _ Yes! _ " Rogers moves, and then he amends, " _ No _ , and also yes! You should actually want sex, with whoever you choose, not because they've told you you should." An appalled and shuddering silence falls, then he says, venomous, "Fuck, I'm  _ so angry _ . Not at you," he tacks on in a hurry after Rogers hisses between his teeth. "I just-” He springs to his feet and whirls back into the bathroom. The door slams. The walls shiver.

"Come on, stand up," Rogers says, and Bucky does. He's shaking as the adrenaline wears off, the heavy fog between him and the world receding into nothingness.

Rogers leads him to a couch. He sits, and Rogers crouches on the floor and stares up into his face.

"Bucky," he starts, and then falls silent. His expression is creased and pinched and worn, like a drawing left in the gutter. He opens his mouth, starts to shape something - _ 'I'm- _ ' and then cuts off, looks down at the ground.

"Bucky," he says again, and then, "What did you need?"

There's a strangled sound in the bathroom, and this whole room stinks of appalling sorrow, and Bucky, shaking, useless, needs-

"Nothing," he says, and watches as Rogers' eyes well with tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was pretty dark, I know, but Bucky will begin the recovery process next chapter.
> 
> I'm so sorry for taking so long to get this out! Also, apologies for not responding to everyone's comments yet; I'm working my way through them as best as I can.
> 
> Comments and criticism are welcome!


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